Author Archives: Warren Stewart

National: Their work secured the election. It also paved the way for pro-Trump conspiracies. | Kevin Collier/NBC

Watching coverage of pro-Trump rioters storm the Capitol building Jan. 6, Matt Bernhard had to wonder: How much were he and his colleagues to blame? “We spent the last five years putting in all this work,” said Bernhard, an engineer at VotingWorks, a nonprofit election technology company, and an expert in election cybersecurity. “And somehow despite all that, there was the worst insurrection in the country since the Civil War because people don’t trust the outcome.”  Like all cybersecurity research, election security relies heavily on the premise that to make any system better, you first need to draw attention to the ways people can hack it. Bernhard’s peers have done that with gusto since the beginning of the Trump administration. They’ve showed how, in the right isolated circumstances, a voter registration machine can be rewired to play the 90s computer game Doom, or how a child could hack a vulnerable website that was coded to look like Florida’s election night reporting site. While their research heavily contributed to security upgrades ahead of the contentious 2020 election — one that election officials jointly called “the most secure in American history” — it has proven to be a double-edged sword. Election cybersecurity researchers who spoke with NBC News say they worry it also provided ammunition to bad-faith actors who have sought to convince some Americans that the election was illegitimate. “We always knew we were walking a bit of a scary line when flagging vulnerabilities,” Maggie MacAlpine, an election security researcher, said. “We’re always battling the fact that the appearance of a hack can be as impactful on an election as an actual hack.”

Full Article: Trump conspiracies strain election cybersecurity experts

National: Experts warn of dangers from breach of voter system software | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

Republican efforts questioning the outcome of the 2020 presidential race have led to voting system breaches that election security experts say pose a heightened risk to future elections. Copies of the Dominion Voting Systems software used to manage elections — from designing ballots to configuring voting machines and tallying results — were distributed at an event this month in South Dakota organized by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an ally of former President Donald Trump who has made unsubstantiated claims about last year’s election. “It’s a game-changer in that the environment we have talked about existing now is a reality,” said Matt Masterson, a former top election security official in the Trump administration. “We told election officials, essentially, that you should assume this information is already out there. Now we know it is, and we don’t know what they are going to do with it.” The software copies came from voting equipment in Mesa County, Colorado, and Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump allies had sue unsuccessfully challenging the results from last fall.

Full Article: Experts warn of dangers from breach of voter system software

National: Partisan Republican vote ‘audits’ are making elections less safe, officials say | Josh Marcus/The Independent

Even though they’re often conducted under the nominal banner of election security, Republican efforts to scrutinize the 2020 election results have made elections less safe, according to cyber security experts. Earlier this month, copies of the widely used Dominion Voting Systems election software were shared with attendees at an election event organised by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump supporter and booster of election conspiracy theories. It’s unclear how the software reached participants, but cyber experts told the Associated Press that now that the Dominion software, which is used in roughly 30 states, is out in public hands, it may make it easier for hackers and others bad actors to find vulnerabilities. “It’s a game-changer in that the environment we have talked about existing now is a reality,” Matt Masterson, a former top election security official in the Trump administration, told the AP. “We told election officials, essentially, that you should assume this information is already out there. Now we know it is, and we don’t know what they are going to do with it.”

Full Article: Partisan Republican vote ‘audits’ are making elections less safe, officials say | The Independent

National: As Washington Stews, State Legislatures Increasingly Shape American Politics | Michael Wines/The New York Times

Full Article: As Washington Stews, State Legislatures Increasingly Shape American Politics – The New York Times

National: Report: Most federal election security money remains unspent | Roxanna Hegeman/Associated Press

Congress provided hundreds of millions of dollars to shore up the nation’s election system against cyberattacks and other threats, but roughly two-thirds of the money remained unspent just weeks before last year’s presidential election. A recently released federal report says the states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories had spent a little more than $255 million of $805 million in election security grants through Sept. 30 of last year, the latest figures available. States were given leeway on how and when to spend their shares because election concerns and potential vulnerabilities of voting systems vary widely across the country. Several election officials cited two main reasons for the slow pace of spending: More than half the money wasn’t allocated until the 2020 election was less than a year away, giving election officials and state lawmakers little time to make major spending decisions. And the coronavirus pandemic upended last year’s election planning, forcing officials to focus on safety at the polls and pivot to provide more early voting and mail-in balloting. “Security was still on everybody’s mind, but it took a back seat to just making sure that the election ran without it just having a total meltdown,” said Don Palmer, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which issued the report. A state-by-state snapshot the commission released last month shows that as of the end of the federal fiscal year on Sept. 30, when early voting was already happening in the presidential election, the nation’s 50 states plus the District of Columbia and five territories had spent roughly 31% of the election security funding. The grant money came in two chunks since 2018 under the Help America Vote Act.

Full Article: Report: Most federal election security money remains unspent

National: Legal experts welcome sanctions of pro-Trump lawyers, say more needed | John Kruzel/The Hill

Attorneys behind some of the dubious litigation over former President Trump’s 2020 election loss were sanctioned this week by a federal judge in a move that was welcomed by legal ethics experts. More disciplinary steps are needed to deter efforts to undermine future U.S. elections, said experts who spoke to The Hill, adding that the system for holding pro-Trump election lawyers to account was working as it should. “The wheels of ethical accountability grind slowly but deliberately,” said Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer. “Within the span of 10 months, we have seen both state bars and the courts take action against those lawyers who took their propagation of Trump’s conspiratorial fantasies out of the cable news studio and into the courtroom.” Following President Biden’s win at the ballot box, pro-Trump attorneys filed dozens of lawsuits based on unfounded claims contesting the election’s legitimacy. The litigation persisted even after the attorneys collectively racked up an abysmal record in court, winning only a single minor case while losing some 60 others. Although some Trump-allied attorneys characterized their actions as hard-fought advocacy, critics say they crossed an ethical red line by deploying politically motivated disinformation to advance Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen from him.

Full Article: Legal experts welcome sanctions of pro-Trump lawyers, say more needed | TheHill

National: Facing Foreign Election Foes, States Hire ‘Cyber Navigators’ | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

After more than a year of virtual meetings, Bill Ekblad showed up last week at eight southern Minnesota election offices to deliver a simple message to county election chiefs and information technology directors: You don’t need to face the massive cybersecurity threat alone. A Navy veteran who served 26 years as a cybersecurity strategist, Ekblad is Minnesota’s first cyber navigator, charged with helping local election offices defend against the ongoing menace from foreign foes. “Savvy adversaries are finding new ways to wreak havoc, and that could be leveraged in the election world,” he said from the road. “Counties don’t have to face these challenges by themselves.” If a phishing attempt targeted one county election official, it’s likely officials in one of the other 87 counties got a similar email, Ekblad said. Getting ahead of that threat by communicating with every election official around the state is essential, he added. Local election officials are on the front lines of election defense, but they often are underfunded or lack the technical knowhow to protect systems from cyber threats. Seeing this vulnerability, at least seven states—Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio—in recent years have launched cyber navigator programs that offer local election officials state-backed contacts to meet the challenge. Several other states are considering following suit. Mark Lindeman, an acting co-director of Verified Voting, an election security nonprofit, said cyber navigators are akin to personal trainers or financial advisers.

Full Article: Facing Foreign Election Foes, States Hire ‘Cyber Navigators’ | The Pew Charitable Trusts

National: House passes bill bolstering landmark voting law | Brian Slodysko/Associated Press

House Democrats have passed legislation that would strengthen a landmark civil rights-era voting law weakened by the Supreme Court over the past decade, a step party leaders tout as progress in their quest to fight back against voting restrictions advanced in Republican-led states. The bill, which is part of a broader Democratic effort to enact a sweeping overhaul of elections, was approved on a 219-212 vote, with no Republican support. Its Tuesday passage was praised by President Joe Biden, who said it would protect a “sacred right” and called on the Senate to “send this important bill to my desk.” But the measure faces dim prospects in that chamber, where Democrats do not have enough votes to overcome opposition from Senate Republicans, who have rejected the bill as “unnecessary” and a Democratic “power grab.” That bottleneck puts Democrats right back where they started with a slim chance of enacting any voting legislation before the 2022 midterm elections, when some in the party fear new GOP laws will make it harder for many Americans to vote.

Full Article: House passes bill bolstering landmark voting law

National: U.S. Attorney General urges election officials to share threats | Linda So/Reuters

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland urged state and local election officials on Thursday to immediately provide the FBI any threatening communications they receive following a rise in threats against U.S. election administrators. “To help us help you, I urge that you preserve and immediately provide to the FBI any threatening communications you receive in any form,” Garland told a meeting of election officials that was also attended by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and senior Justice Department officials. In late June, the DOJ launched a task force with the FBI to investigate threats against election workers. “Our attention to this issue will not wane,” said Garland, according to a transcript of his remarks. “The Department is committed to investigating and prosecuting violations of federal law against election officials and election workers, and to supporting your safety and security.”

Full Article: U.S. Attorney General urges election officials to share threats | Reuters

National: How a Defunct Federal Provision Helped Pave the Way for New Voting Restrictions | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Georgia toughened identification requirements for absentee voting. Arizona authorized removing voters from the rolls if they do not cast a ballot at least once every two years. Florida and Georgia cut back sharply the use of drop boxes for mail-in ballots. All of these new voting restrictions would have been rejected or at least softened if a federal civil rights protection from the 1960s were still intact, experts in election law said. For decades, the heart of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a practice known as preclearance, largely detailed under Section 5 of the statute. It forced states with a history of racial discrimination to seek approval from the Department of Justice before enacting new voting laws. Through preclearance, thousands of proposed voting changes were blocked by Justice Department lawyers in both Democratic and Republican administrations. In 2013, however, Section 5 was hollowed out by the Supreme Court, as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote in a majority opinion that racial discrimination in voting no longer constituted a significant threat. As Republican-led state legislatures have tightened voting rules after the 2020 election, new restrictions have been enacted or proposed in four states that are no longer required to seek approval before changing voting laws: Georgia, Arizona, Texas and Florida. Those new restrictions would almost certainly have been halted, stalled or altered had Section 5 still been in use, according to interviews with former federal prosecutors and a review by The New York Times of past civil rights actions by the Justice Department.

Full Article: How a Defunct Federal Provision Helped Pave the Way for New Voting Restrictions – The New York Times